Seoul Halloween stampede: Panicked emergency calls reveal crowd’s surge fears

South Korea moved to calm public outrage on Tuesday over a Halloween party crush that killed more than 150 people, most of them young, promising a speedy and intensive inquiry and calling for tough new safety measures to prevent similar disasters.

National police commissioner general Yoon Hee-keun said that crowd control at the scene was “inadequate”. The country’s chief security officer, interior minister Lee Sang-min, had said deploying more police would not have prevented the disaster.

“The police will speedily and rigorously conduct intensive inspections and investigation on all aspects without exception to explain the truth of this accident,” he added.

Seoul police assigned 137 officers to manage a crowd of Halloween revelers anticipated to number more than 100,000 over the weekend — a decision that has come under intense criticism following the deaths of more than 150 people when the group surged.

By comparison, nearly 7,000 police officers were sent to another part of the South Korean capital on Saturday to monitor dueling protests that drew tens of thousands – but still fewer people than flocked to the popular nightlife district of Itaewon the same night.

Even the task force created to investigate why the crowd surged, with 475 members, is more than three times larger than the detail assigned to crowd control.

As South Korea mourns, officials are facing tough questions about preparations for the celebrations and demands for accountability in the wake of the country’s worst disaster in nearly a decade.

The national government has insisted there was no way to predict the crowd would get out of control.

Experts disagree. Deploying so few police officers, they said, showed officials were poorly prepared despite knowing ahead of time that there would be a huge gathering following the easing of Covid-19 restrictions in recent months.

On top of assigning more personnel, police and officials in the Yongsan district, which governs Itaewon, should have banned cars from some streets and taken other measures to ease the crowding in narrow lanes like the one where the deaths occurred, experts said.

Instead, the 137 officers in Itaewon were assigned to monitor crime, with a particular focus on narcotics use, meaning that for all practical purposes “no one was looking after pedestrian safety,” said Kong Ha-song, a disaster prevention professor at South Korea’s Woosuk University.

The deaths should be seen as a “manmade disaster,” said Lee Changmoo, an urban planning professor at Seoul’s Hanyang University.

Authorities have come under similar criticism in national media and on social networks. The headline of an editorial in the Hankyoreh newspaper on Sunday described the tragedy as “all too avoidable.”

The paper said its reporting showed that a pedestrian got knocked down by a crowd in Itaewon a day before the Halloween festivities — although no one was hurt.

A temporary morgue for some of the people killed in South Korea’s Halloween party crush is now a huge lost-and-found, where hundreds of items such as a “Happy Halloween” backpack and a Minnie Mouse hairband await their owners.

The Wonhyoro sports centre was quiet this morning, three days after the crush in the popular Itaewon district during Halloween festivities, as a few people sifted through more than 800 recovered lost items.

Five kilometres from the scene of the disaster, the modern sports facility was used in the initial hours to keep the bodies of some of the 156 people crushed to death when a chaotic surge of people poured into a narrow alley late on Saturday.

Today, its floor was laid with 256 pairs of shoes, 258 pieces of clothing, 124 bags and 156 electronic items, and other personal belongings, including stuffed animal key chains and festive Halloween masks.

Mobile phones and identification cards were kept separately at a police station.

One survivor of the crush walked through the items looking for her bag, her left leg in a cast from her injury that night. She couldn’t find what she was looking for.

The woman, who declined to give her name, said she and her friend were about to head home when the crowd swelled dangerously and ended up in a large crowd pushing forward into a narrow, sloped alleyway. She got jammed in place near the bottom of the hill.

“I was smothered at the far bottom (of the alley), but I survived because my upper torso wasn’t pressed under,” she said. She said her friend was also rescued.

South Korea’s police chief admitted “a heavy responsibility” for failing to prevent the crowd surge that killed more than 150 people during Halloween festivities in Seoul, saying this morning that officers didn’t effectively handle earlier emergency calls about the impending disaster.

The admission came as the South Korean government faces growing public scrutiny over whether the crowd surge on Saturday night in Seoul’s Itaewon district, a popular nightlife neighborhood, could have been prevented and who should take responsibility for the country’s worst disaster in years.

“I feel a heavy responsibility (for the disaster) as the head of one of related government offices,” Yoon Hee Keun, commissioner general of the Korean National Police Agency, told a televised news conference. “Police will do their best to prevent a tragedy like this from happening again.”

Mr Yoon said an initial investigation has found that there were many urgent calls by citizens notifying authorities about the potential danger of a crowd gathering in Itaewon, but officers who had received those calls didn’t respond to them in a satisfactory manner.

Mr Yoon said police have subsequently launched an intense internal probe to look into the officers’ handling of the emergency calls and other issues like their on-the-spot response to the crowd surge in Itaewon that night.

South Korea’s prime minister Han Duck-soo said the absence of “institutional support” measures for crowd management was one of the causes behind the deadly crush that killed more than 150 party-goers in central Seoul over the weekend.

Speaking at a news conference, he said the ongoing investigation over the disaster will also cover whether relevant institutions’ on-site responses were adequate.

The initial shock from a deadly crush among Halloween party-goers in South Korea is turning into public outrage over the government’s planning missteps, as business owners say police were more focused on crime and Covid than crowd safety.

“It’s no different from war,” said Kang Sung-jun, 76, who was mourning the victims at a makeshift altar today. “I think if people with responsibilities had paid more attention to the people’s movements, this kind of accident would not have happened.”

Yoon Hee-keun, chief of the National Police Agency, apologised and pledged to investigate.

“We confirmed that there were multiple calls to our hotline before the accident which urgently warned of the danger of large crowd gatherings, but our on-site responses to those reports were insufficient,” Mr Yoon told a news conference.

South Korean authorities have a long history of managing large political rallies, but the annual festivities in Itaewon in Seoul did not have a central steering entity.

Business owners in the neighbourhood have said they met with local police officials before the festivities, but officers were mostly focused on curbing drug and sexual abuses and other crimes, as well as the spread of Covid-19.

Oh Seung-jin, a Seoul police official, acknowledged yesterday that authorities did not have a manual on how to respond to large gatherings without an organiser, and had focused on crime prevention.

Interior minister Lee Sang-min has fuelled public anger by saying more police and firefighters would not have prevented the disaster, and warning against politically motivated criticism.

Opposition lawmakers slammed Mr Lee’s remarks, urging president Yoon Suk-yeol to sack him.

He issued a statement clarifying he regretted his comment and would focus on finding the cause of the accident.

The deadly crush poses a crucial test for Mr Yoon, who is already struggling with low approval ratings as he tries to fuel a post-Covid economic recovery and deal with North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests.

Botched disaster responses have proven politically fatal for other South Korean leaders, and Mr Yoon took heat in August for his initial handling of flooding around the country.

He reacted relatively quickly to the crush, visiting the scene, launching a task force team to investigate the accident and designating Itaewon as a disaster zone. Today, he called for concrete crowd management measures.

Many South Koreans said they were in shock over how a casual night out had turned deadly.

“I’m devastated. They were going to see their friends for a good time, but instead, their warm hearts disappeared. I am so sad that I can’t even express my sorrow,” Kim Keun-nyeo, 54, said an altar near Seoul city hall.

An Australian survivor of a crowd crush that killed more than 150 partygoers in the South Korean capital of Seoul blamed the huge loss of life on officials’ failure to employ effective crowd controls despite anticipating a massive turnout for the Halloween celebrations.

Nathan Taverniti, 24, said he’s still grappling with emotional shock after one of his friends died during the tragedy on Saturday at the nightlife district of Itaewon.

The crush happened in a narrow, downhill alley running between a dense row of store fronts and the landmark Hamilton Hotel. The path became clogged by a huge and unstoppable wave of partygoers before some of them fell and toppled over one another like dominoes, according to witnesses, before suffocating to death.

An estimated 100,000 partygoers flocked to Itaewon for the Halloween celebrations over the weekend, and some experts say it should have been an obvious decision for authorities to temporarily block some of the neighbourhood’s notoriously narrow lanes and hills.

“If the government knows that there were going to be that many people there, and there is going to be road blockages, there should be enough police and emergency services already there on standby,” Mr Taverniti said.

Days after more than 150 Halloween revelers died in South Korea’s deadliest crowd surge, a quiet but wrenching reminder of the disaster remained on Tuesday: Hundreds of abandoned shoes have been laid out in neat rows in a badminton court in the capital Seoul.

Police have assembled the crumpled tennis shoes, loafers and Chuck Taylors — part of 1.5 tons of personal objects left by victims and survivors of the tragedy — in hopes that the owners, or their friends and family, will retrieve them.

The deadly crush in the nearby nightlife district Itaewon happened after tens of thousands gathered for Halloween celebrations Saturday evening. Part of the crowd got jammed in a narrow, downhill alley between a dense row of storefronts and the district’s landmark Hamilton Hotel. Partygoers were seen carrying out the wounded and dead, while dozens of lifeless bodies covered in blankets were laid out in rows on the nearby pavement.

Most of the victims were women and many of them were missing shoes, which experts say reflects the force of a crowd surge that stripped footwear from their feet in the crush.

Some 250 pairs of shoes at the gym are part of a huge collection of abandoned items found in Itaewon following the tragedy. There are also hundreds of pieces of clothing, including coats and movie character costumes, as well as handbags, smartphones, Bluetooth earpieces and a few passports, including at least one belonging to a US citizen.

South Korea is in a one-week shock mourning after the country’s citizens witnessed one of the worst disasters that happened overnight in years and caused the deaths of 156 people and leaving almost as many injured.

A night that was supposed to be a stress-free celebration of Halloween after two years of pandemic restrictions in the streets of Seoul led instead to a massive pile-up that prompted the country’s prime minister Han Duck-soo to announce a stringent probe into the night’s events.

The crush happened when a massive 100,000-plus crowd of revellers on Saturday flocked for festivities in the district of Itaewon in Seoul – a metropolis known for its tough living conditions and punishing, cramped living and public spaces for its residents.

Read the details in this report from my colleague Maroosha Muzaffar: